Slavoj Zizek's dialectics of ideology and the discourses of Irish education

Abstract

A number of different languages or discourses are evident in contemporary Irish educational policy, debate and theory: the grammar of commodity and marketisation, the poetry of Bildung and culture, the prose of Christian formation and revelation together with the ubiquitous rhetoric of personal developmental psychology. These are among the languages and dialects vying for descriptive, and more significantly, normative dominance. All of these languages claim both to describe and legitimise the reality of education while tensions and antagonism between these understandings divide the educational community, politicians and social commentators. They also function as ‘formative discourses’ shaping the way in which we view and imagine learners. Reading these languages as examples of dialectical ideology types as proposed by Slavoj Zizek together with the application of his critique of ideology suggest a new way of illuminating the languages of education. In the course of this critique a novel notion of the subjectivity of the learner that eludes dominance by language and the symbolic order is proposed.

Keywords:

• educational discourses
• Zizek
• educational ideology
• subjectivity

Notes

1. To take just one example, the Department of Education and Science Statement of Strategy 2005–2007 speaks of ‘high standards of service, greater accountability and quality planning to meet future educational needs’ and ‘delivering quality services that address the needs of our customers, clients and learners at all levels’ (http//www.education.ie/home and follow directions to Reports and Publications/ General/ Strategy Statement 2005–2007).

2. Ayn Rand put the connection between learning and wealth succinctly as ‘Wealth is the product of man's ability to think’.

3. The term Bildung appears in educational writings in Germany in the 1750s. It has been translated variously as ‘formation’, ‘personal, cultural and moral development’ and a’ process of gradual perfection to an ideal’. It connotes more than knowledge and psychological development. As much of its richness of meaning is lost in translation, the term is usually left in the original (see Nordenbo 2002).

4. The Greek term for education or learning is equivalent to the Latin humanitas and refers to broad education of mind, body and senses [hence the term encyclopaedia]. It also carries with it connotations of moral, cultural and even theological development (particularly in Plato's Republic). As a classical Greek educational term, it also refers, of course, to the initiation of the citizen into the state and politics.

5. German: ‘picture’, ‘image’, ‘impression’.

6. Terry Eagleton (2003) has described him as the most ‘formidably brilliant cultural theorist’ to come out of Europe in the last decades.

7. Zizek is, of course, not the first philosopher to challenge the Cartesian view of the subject. The philosophy of the twentieth century has sought grounds for subjectivation in, among others, the ‘body’ or ‘text’ and ‘trans-subjective will and power’. These accounts too have had (perhaps subtle) influence on how contemporary education plays a part in the construction of the subject.

8. In Kantian terms, the ‘noumenal’ self can never appear ‘phenomenally’ to itself because then the difference between the noumenal and phenomenal would collapse.